Garden Furnishings 387 



mean, light-built affair. It should be of good pro- 

 portions and substantial materials. It need not be 

 made with brick or marble pillars ; natural tree 

 trunks of good size serve as well. It should look 

 as if it had been built with care and stability, and 

 that the vines had been planted and trained by- 

 skilled gardeners. A pergola may have a dilapi- 

 dated Present and be endurable; but it should 

 show evidences of a substantial Past. 



Little sisters of the pergola are the charmilles^ or 

 bosquets, arches of growing trees, whose interlaced 

 boughs have no supports of wood as have the per- 

 golas. When these arches are carefully trained and 

 pruned, and the ground underneath is laid with turf 

 or gravel, they form a delightful shady walk. 



Charming covered ways can be easily made by 

 polling and training Plum or Willow trees. Arches 

 are far too rare in American gardens. The few we 

 have are generally old ones. In Mrs. Pierson's 

 garden in Salem the splendid arch of Buckthorn is a 

 hundred and twenty five years old. Similar ones are 

 at Indian Hill. Cedar was an old choice for hedges 

 and arches. It easily winter-kills at the base, and 

 that is ample reason for its rejection and disuse. 



The many garden seats of the old English garden 

 were perhaps its chief feature in distinction from 

 American garden furnishings to-day. In a letter 

 written from Kenilworth in 1575 the writer told of 

 garden seats where he sat in the heat of summer, 

 " feeling the pleasant whisking wynde." I have 

 walked through many a large modern garden in the 

 summer heat, and longed in vain for a shaded seat 



